Personalised Health Care

So today was the big day here in Ohio. I was the opening keynote and I had to get across the key theory behind the work we are doing here on health and well being as well as the practice. Given a variety of circumstances I couldn't get together with my partner in crime design here Ann Pendleton-Julian. We had an intensive meeting and I then retreated to my room with half an hour to put together the slides and get them onto the conference computer. Half an hour later after the introduction I was on my feet with 50 minutes ahed of me. Now I never worry about this sort of process. In my experience the immediacy (if you know your subject and only then) increases your sensitivity to the audience and ability to get a complex appoint across. From my perspective I sat down feeling that it was one of the top three keynotes I have done this year and the feedback confirmed it. Without Ann's briefing I would not have been as effective. I've loaded the slides and there will be a video sometime soon.

Its worth summarising what I did as bullets and I will expand on all of these over the next month or so:

I started with the point that theory and practice need to co-evolve attaching the purely empirical model that is adopted in social sciences. In effect a medical model of research.

This brought me to Complexity theory (illustrated by the Children's Party story), exaptation and the need to creating exaptive moments with micro narrative, human metadata and distributed cognition. I've spoken and blogged about them many times but this was a condensed and effective summary of the key points.

Theory complete I moved on to SenseMaker® and in particular why we use human metadata and balanced triads for signification. As normal I illustrated that with the nonsense of employee satisfaction surveys

From there I moved into the really exiting stuff we are doing with Ohio. That includes creating a version fo SenseMaker® that allows personal journals (partial screen shot shown above and the icon here) and field books to be maintained. You'll see more and more of this over time along with the radically new stuff on narrative mapping of journeys. Sorry to be cryptic on that but we have IP stuff to do before we can really publish it or talk in other than high level at the moment.

Finally I went into a standard close around recipe books and chefs. I also made the key point that out new approaches allow the patient to be a subject again not an object.

Now this was interesting as a process. I was assembling known material that I have in modular form, adapting it to a new context in a different sequence. The more you do it, the easier it is and the more enjoyable.

We are making available a set of SenseMaker® demonstration projects around health and well being tomorrow so I will publish them here. Thanks to all who helped out with my crowd sourcing of one of the project signifier sets last night. In the panel session afterwards Ann made a very important point about SenseMaker®. We hold material in analogue form, but people create digital material through signification. Big data starts by making things digital and looses richness in consequence.

Finally, the last time I was here was in April when I had just had the Diabetes II diagnosis and was starting a journey. A few months later I met people again for the first time having lost 19kg and with clothes hanging loose with a gratifying response. I'll be leaving some of those clothes here, I am disposing out outsize items every few weeks at the moment and for the next three months I am going to have to buy stuff to dispose so if you see a lack of my variety of dress that is the reason.

It has also made health and well being personal for me, and that helps.

I have two major blogs to write following other sessions at the conference. One on design thinking and its differences with complexity (in its popular form) and the other on big data point above.